cover image A Knot Is Not a Tangle

A Knot Is Not a Tangle

Benjamin Friedlander. Krupskaya, $9 (28pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-06-5

""How much is that/ Garfield in the window?"" asks Friedlander in ""The Ugly American,"" a stubborn anti-lyric poised sublimely between cheap-shot and grotesque. Although this fourth full-length collection is as easy to follow as the rants of Dennis Miller, it leads to darker places more likely to be explored by German playwright Heiner M ller (The Hamlet Machine). Long acknowledged as the chief contrarian in his generation of avant-garde poets, Friedlander engages in implosive, deliberately ugly satire on the late century's morals: Bud Light spokesdog Spuds McKenzie is a ""Pit bull/ in a halter top/ sniveling/ a beer""; the case of Susan Smith is part of a simile (""Like a minivan/ rolled into a lake/ your eyes...""). Friedlander took Melanie Klein's description of the oral sadistic phase of development (a stage characterized by the ego's inability to identify with its objects) as the epigraph to a previous collection, but the hostility and scatology are here under tight control, compulsively readable even when invoking the unspeakable: ""The soldier has a head/ to stub/ as a hobo would/ a butt, lovingly."" Like many a satirist before him, Friedlander subscribes to a utilitarian view of literature and claims for himself an expressly purgative role. ""To write a poem that expressed regret/ for poems that no one could ever get// lets neither poet nor poem off the hook,"" he writes in ""Ode to Communication."" Complementing others whose work ""is all heart,"" Friedlander sets forth a poetics that is ""mostly kidney,/ purifying the blood,/ producing piss."" Their function complete, these poems offer real relief. (July)